Black Mexico
Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times
The essays in this collection build upon a series of conversations and papers that resulted from "New Directions in North American Scholarship on Afro-Mexico," a symposium conducted at Pennsylvania State University in 2004. The issues addressed include contested historiography, social and economic contributions of Afro-Mexicans, social construction of race and ethnic identity, forms of agency and resistance, and contemporary inquiry into ethnographic work on Afro-Mexican communities. Comprised of a core set of chapters that examine the colonial period and a shorter epilogue addressing the modern era, this volume allows the reader to explore ideas of racial representation from the sixteenth century into the twenty-first.
Ben Vinson III is professor of history and Director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico, Flight: The Story of Virgil Richardson, A Tuskegee Airman in Mexico, and coauthor of African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. Matthew Restall is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Restall is also the author of Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua, and Maya Accounts of the Conquest Wars (coauthor), Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, The Maya World, and The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatán.